Supercommunicators: How to Unlock the Secret Language of Connection

by Charles Duhigg

There are practical, decision-making conversations that focus on What’s This Really About? There are emotional conversations, which ask How Do We Feel? And there are social conversations that explore Who Are We? We are often moving in and out of all three conversations as a dialogue unfolds.

The most effective communicators pause before they speak and ask themselves: Why am I opening my mouth?

She had assumed that the goal of discussing a conflict and engaging in debate was achieving victory, defeating the other side. But that’s not right. Rather, the real goal is figuring out why a conflict exists in the first place.

Finally, happy couples seemed to concentrate more on controlling the boundaries of the conflict itself. “Happy couples, when they fight, usually try to make the fight as small as possible, not let it bleed into other fights,” said Karney. But unhappy couples let one area of disagreement spill into everything else. “They start arguing about, ‘Are we spending the holidays with my family or yours?’ and pretty soon it becomes, ‘You’re so selfish, you never do the laundry, this is why we don’t have enough money.’ ” (In marriage therapy, this is called kitchen-sinking, a particularly destructive pattern.)

(This, in fact, is why discussing experiences is so powerful: We’re all experts in what we’ve seen and felt.)

“He was a very self-critical person,” said Waldinger, who currently leads the Harvard project. “He pushed himself hard and judged himself pretty harshly, and that made him successful in his profession. But it also meant he was critical of other people, which is probably what alienated so many of them.”

Social isolation, the researchers wrote, was more dangerous than diabetes and a host of other chronic diseases.